Sunday Roundup

08/26/2016 02:20 pm ETUpdated
Aug 27, 2017

This week the nation watched as an increasingly desperate - even sad! - Donald Trump scrambled to shore up his bankrupt campaign. His latest attempt at a pivot - to use the pundits' preferred euphemism for blatant pandering - was pandering in the form of abandoning (pandbandoning?) his signature policy, the mass expulsion of 11 million undocumented immigrants. On Wednesday, he said if they paid back taxes, they could get legal status -- though this was, he assured, "no amnesty." But poor, desperate Donald is a failure even at pandering. His new policy is suspiciously close to what he relentlessly mocked his primary opponents for. Back then, he called Rubio a "lightweight choker" and Cruz "weak on illegal immigration," for proposing similar policies. Call it the Trump Paradox: he changes every position without the slightest hesitation and yet he's somehow always the same - as we saw this week when, surrounded by white people in Jackson, Mississippi, he called Hillary Clinton "a bigot who sees people of color only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future." No matter how many Trumps his new team rolls out, and no matter how much the shameful establishment Republicans who have endorsed him wish otherwise, he's a comically transparent man who's incapable of evolving and growing. As Trump himself put it, "I am who I am." It may be the only completely true thing he's ever said.